Slashdot Mirror
HP Gives Printers Email Addresses
Barence writes "HP is set to unveil a line of printers with their own email addresses, allowing people to print from devices such as smartphones and tablets. The addresses will allow users to email their documents or photos directly to their own — or someone else's — printer. It will also let people more easily share physical documents; rather than merely emailing links around, users can email a photo to a friend's printer. 'HP plans to offer a few of these new printers to consumers this month, and then a few more of the products to small businesses in September.'"
could never ever be abused in any way.
Tell me these will use at least a whitelist to determine which emails get printed. I don't need a stack of full color Viagr@ spam in my printer tray.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Now HP will finally make money off all those v1@grA ads I keep getting.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
This could have been amazing ten years ago... but printers as a technology on the whole seem to be dying out to me. I knew fewer people that have them, as there is very little that needs to be printed anymore.
At work we have printers and scanners you can email to, from Ricoh.
Not sure what this is getting on slashdot for exactly?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
1. Spambots sending your printer garbage...
2. DDOS somebody's printer with a combo of tubgirl / lemonparty / goat.se
3. ???
4. Profit?
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
So they will be easier to hack now?
How long before a bug in the email app is found and mass printers get hacked?
And so now we're back to fax spam? Thanks HP!
Mod point free since 2001
who can't already print from their existing email client?
great, another 50MB of bloat on top of the 95MB they currently cram down your throat and insist on updating daily. With their own proprietary update scheduler. For something that requires maybe 20K of actual code, if any.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
A spammers mouth just started salivating uncontrollably.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
...and by "congratulations", I mean a nice, hard punch in the crotch.
What in the hell were they thinking? EMAIL IS NOT A FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL, DAMMIT.
Now when you are fired your boss can let your kids and wife know by printing out You're Fired from all the printers in the house.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Now we really can complain how spammers cost us money!
Yes, there are many possible problems with spam, etc. But at least they are using an open standard: email. Perhaps IPP might be better. This means any email user (including any smart phone user) can print which is kinda cool.
For years I've been looking for a viable replacement for my aging fax machine. Fax... that's short for facsimile for you youngsters.
I know the rest of you have all been looking for an better way than plain e-mail to exchange physical copies of documents. There's just nothing like holding the document in your hand. Am I right?
So I'll let *you* decide what I need to have printed. Send me your stuff: tonerlow@anothersillymarketingideanobodyneeds.com
Now we keep buying very overpriced ink cartridges just so some spammer can send Viagra ads directly to our printers, or worse, a facebook friend emails their entire set of holiday photos.
No thanks HP. Terrible idea.
For starters this isn't exactly new. It might be new to consumer grade crapware printers, but I believe I setup a Canon office copier that had the ability to receive emails and print them approximately 8 years ago.
Furthermore, why are we printing photos at home? If they're worth printing they're worth printing really well, which isn't cheap and should be done at a print shop, framed, and hung on the wall. Otherwise, gaze upon it on the screen, add it to your screen saver's image loop, and move on.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Exactly my first thought. Then I thought, HP *must* be doing something to add some security so that only the owner, and friends/relatives specifically authorized by the owner, can send emails to the printer. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but nobody wants to waste $500+/mo on inkjet ink (which we all know is one of the most expensive substances in the world) and paper to print spam.
I doubt they'd require users to use public-key cryptography to verify their identity, but at the very least, they could setup some filters so it will only print emails from certain 'from' addresses. *Unfortunately*, half the spam I get appears to have come from my own email address (because, as we all know, anyone can forge the 'from' address, which I've always thought is a seriously *bad* deficiency of the current email standards - you don't even need every end-user to implement public-key cryptography to get stronger identity authentication - all you really need is for the mail servers to use cryptographic authentication between themselves to prove that an email claiming to be from domain example.com is actually *from* the example.com email server; the example.com server can take care of authenticating end-users with password or other means).
..thank you, HP, and don't forget to leave us a backdoor so we can empty people's trays when things get bad for us.
And scanners must be webservers. I mean, it fits the paradigm completely - small, parametrizable requests, big gobs of response, and done. Why haven't they been built ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
1. Spambots sending your printer garbage...
2. DDOS somebody's printer with a combo of tubgirl / lemonparty / goat.se
3. Invest in companies that sell ink
4. Profit?
And TCP/IP wasn't designed with Carrier Pigeons in mind, but it can and does work that way...
SECURITY HOLE? This is going to be the greatest corporate espionage tool since the camera phone!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I came here to post this question: What could possibly go wrong?
And discovered that just about everybody else had exactly the same reaction. There were two or three responses that at first glance seemed to think this was a good idea, then I read them closer and realized they were being sarcastic.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
although I think they're not seeing the paper for the print.... if they really want to capitalize on cartridge replacement, they should make printers that print both the text, and the page; kind of like 3d printers. They could market it as 'earth-friendly' while driving the cost (and profit margin) of each page up exponentially. Of course, if I had a printer like this, I'd be printing 20's and 100's...
Another reason to buy HP's overpriced printer ink.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You have to watch those guys. One day they're innocently printing email so that managers will be able to read it, the next they're urgently requesting your assistance in confidential financial matters.
What's next? Printers downloading copyrighted material through p2p networks? Those things are a menace!
By ensuring your ink cartridges are changed regularly, we can help make sure your ink will always be fresh. At HP we're making it easier for empty out those old, crusty ink cartridges by printing all your attachments for you. At the same time we're keeping your ink fresh, we're also helping you uphold your document retention policy by automatically generating hard copies of all your email!
Amazed? Well that's just what we do.
Love,
Hewlett-Packard
two girls one cup ... of printer ink?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I've had a HP printer that instead of giving me a useful error when things didn't work just failed with a "Nope, that didn't work" error.(Oops, I turned off the guest account when printing over the network.) My brother had an HP printer with scanning functionality but the scanning software had a bug where it would always crash on a scan of the last page. (This was apparently a common issue and last I heard it still hasn't been fixed.) So now they're going to have a printer that uses software so you can e-mail it? So they can't get the basic shit to work, why would anybody trust them with anything even slightly advanced?
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Now you'll be able to show your grandkids pictures of trees.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
What in the hell were they thinking? EMAIL IS NOT A FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL, DAMMIT.
Then what store-and-forward file transfer protocol should ISPs make available to their users to replace e-mail attachments?
This is great until someone registers your printer's email address with NAMBLA.
SMTPS or a new avenue for identity theft? Tonight at 11.
Typical HP garbage.
There's barely any need for store and forward anymore. These days people are interconnected with always on links, for the most part.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
So back to black faxing....
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From the company with the most expensive and most annoying cartridges on the market. Its a shyster move to try to sell more HP ink products to the stupider members of the business community, not a well needed and clever feature.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Aside from the obvious problem of people sending lame pictures to your printer all the time, or spamlists getting a hold of your email address, the thing that bothers me the most is:
"rather than merely emailing links around, users can email a photo to a friend's printer."
Am I the only one who sees this as an almost-desperate bid to get people to print more out in an increasingly printless world? Think about all the people you know, and all the random images that you link back and forth. And now imagine if you spent the ink of a full-colour 5x7" on every LOLcats that came to you. And now imagine how much ink you'll be burning through.
More like tubgirl.
SMTP is a store-and-forward protocol which handles arbitrary file content reasonably well, is mature, and is ubiquitous. There may be technically superior store-and-forward protocols for arbitrary content in internet-scale systems (AMQP is shaping up to be one, for instance, though even the current work on v1.0 focuses on internal institutional systems and doesn't, IIRC, get into the weeds of addressing and interoperation necessary for internet-scale deployment, leaving that for a future revision), but none with the maturity and ubiquity of e-mail.
I wanna see a printer join slashdot!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
There's nothing inherently insecure about email, at least for the purposes of this discussion; it's plaintext e-mail that's inherently secure. You could hack together a secure solution on a Linux box over the weekend using postfix, GPG and a Python[*] script and a user account. All you need to do is make sure that every e-mail printed is digitally signed, with the script checking each e-mail against the user account's public keyring. If the mail isn't signed, or is signed by a public key not in the user account's public keyring, then the Python script just ignores/deletes the e-mail. Otherwise, it prints what it gets -- a PDF attachment might be best, but there are other ways you could go.
My blog
(Which is not Harry Potter, though!)
More (useless) printouts, more money for HP with printers and consumables!
Why sending a printout when you can send a link to a photo or even the photo itself?
Why sending a paper document when you can send the document itself?
Simple, because otherwise you will peruse it without printing it in a large number of cases!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
These days people are interconnected with always on links, for the most part.
As I understand your comment, you want people to send files back and forth with instant messaging programs. But then they both have to have accounts on the same IM network; they both have to be using an IM client that supports file transfers, which a lot of the Free ones don't over the major IM networks if I remember correctly; one of them has to forward a port on the firewall; and (here's the big one) they both have to be in front of a PC at the same time, which is difficult if they live in different time zones or if they have only one hour of computer time per day, after which it is another family member's turn to use the computer.
Because a firmware upgrade wouldn't add an ethernet port. The idea here I think is that the printer does not need to be connected to a computer, only the internet. You could perhaps argue that USB/parallel would work, but you would still need some sort of interface to connect the printer to the web. A firmware upgrade by itself would not to the trick.
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
EMSI, FTS-0001, or BinkP.
My blog
It should only be Slashdot frontpage news if the printer in question is made from a felt tip pen and LEGO.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
That is all.
This guy disagrees.
I have a 10 year old Xerox printer that has an email address. This isn't new by a long shot.
No, that'd be too expensive. Two girls, one thimble.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Whitelisting your own e-mail address is an utterly pointless tactic in the war against spam. Unless, perhaps, you regularly send e-mail to yourself.
If you regularly send e-mail to yourself, that sounds like another problem entirely...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
EMAIL IS NOT A FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL, DAMMIT.
What makes you say that?
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Yeah, but he started it.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I can do this with an Inbox rule in Outlook today. Why would I want my printer doing it autonomously?
I think I'll start anonymously emailing CP to a few of these new printers and then notify the FBI.
You’re kidding, but FYI e-mail doesn’t work that way.
However there is a significant catch that could result in something similar. Most multipurpose printer/copier/scanner/fax machines keep everything ever printed, scanned, copied, or faxed on the machine stored on their hard drives. Depending on whether or not you have to authenticate yourself (entering a code), someone might be able to anonymously walk up to it and scan something bad. Anything done over the network would make them identifiable, most likely, but if someone could get physical access to the machine and scan something anonymously then bad things could result...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I can see it now..
"Somebody help me! I'm out of paper and I've got a SPOOLER ERROR!! Why does it hurt?!"
Would SPAM be a problem if the machine requires that the sender's email address be on the whitelist and a passcode must be in the subject line?
Have 2 different passcodes - printer code for printing, admin code to remotely execute certain commands (like adding/removing other email addresses from the whitelist). Throw in a little logic to take itself offline temporarily (or some other response) if it's getting DOS'd. Should be fairly ok, no?
Autoresponder loop wars! Now they might even catch fire!
Dear HP Printer,
PC Load Letter???? What the @#$!# does that mean?!?!?
Sincerely,
Frustrated User.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Did you think of 4chan? For some reason, I did...
There was the run a while back where somebody discovered the admin page for large industrial printers could be easily searched to find unprotected panels, and that print jobs could be remotely administered... how many million pages of unsavory imagery were printed for the next day or two is anybody's guess...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Excellent points made that I had not considered.
Fax?
At least they know where to send their DMCA takedowns to now.
It appears I'm the only one that is kinda excited by this idea.
This is not something for your average business that has a BizHub Mega 5000X or whatever.
If my home laser printer has an email address, then when the random friend/relative visits and wants to print something I don't have to go through hoops to make it happen. I don't have to give them permissions, install drivers, remember IPs, or have them email it to me just for me to open it and print.
Does this have the potential for abuse? If they do an average job with security settings, I don't see this being a huge issue. I'm sure it's something that can be turned off completely, whitelisted, or maybe even password protected (by a word in the subject line).
There might even be some neat programming applications for this, too.
-David
http://www.activeprint.net/
That's just one solution ....
Ya know, hey, HP, how about instead of adding this feature, why not just continue to support your older (but not all that old) printers in newer operating systems?
"There's barely any need for store and forward anymore."
You don't do any global business, do you?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
A previous car of mine stopped running the day after its warranty expired. Coincidence? While taking that loooong walk home I stopped by the post office, and would you believe I had an advertisement to buy a brand new car from the same dealership and a "really great deal on ANY trade in, just drive or push it in" for $$$ off the new car price. I replaced the 'computer module' with an after market unit and drove it for 7 more years. You can guess how much future business they got from me.
This could very easily be used securely without wasting ink, I think ... the simplest prevention may be the best. If this were implemented, even in a public environment, it could be very easily controlled to prevent SPAM. Let's say a hotel has a courtesy printer in the business center, with a public email address, to be used in the method intended in this announcement. From some of the comments, nothing could be asking for abuse more clearly ... BUT, if the printer received an email to be printed, rather than just PRINTING IT, a simple LCD message of: "Print job received via email, press CONFIRM to print now." and if CONFIRM isn't pressed within [timeout threshold], the message is purged from printer storage and NOT printed. Seems pretty simple, I might create a printer line myself doing just this if HP gets it wrong ... you saw it first on Slashdot. Seems like a great idea....
The "printers" I deal with may need plates, regular washups, gallons of chemicals and natural gas, to name but a few, but all we ask our client for is essentially vector art, we take care of the nitty gritty. You can think of us as the "built in" drivers. Even without Postscript / PDF support in the printer, it's gotta be possible to standardize on some protocol for spewing patterns of ink onto the various media available.
Hell, I can dump a JPEG in a $20 photo frame and view it, so why can't I throw one directly at my printer?
We had this in the past. It was called PostScript. PostScript sent would work regardless of printer, be it inkjet, laser, dye sublimation, or high velocity platypus sweat sprayed onto paper.
I wish Adobe would relicense PostScript making the cost on a sliding scale so a low end printer (the usual $50 inkjet that takes cartridges more than what the printer costs) could use it.
Now, drivers are more of for using printer-specific features, not just getting it to print at all.
/inch {72 mul} def newpath 1 inch dup moveto
/Times-Roman findfont 72 scalefont setfont
(You'll see I referred to PostScript in my comment, and that this should be possible with our without it. It's really overkill for most people's needs, especially the printing of bitmap photos) show
showpage
For a bunch of printers, they do. Maybe not all, but many in my experience. That's the driver I normally use.
I really hope they build in a spam filter of some kind or this will turn into the next generation of fax machine where you are always being offered cheap health care and vacations. If put together right this would be a really cool feature.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
This is nice feature but in fact users of Windows Mobile smartphones can print documents on any printer connected to a wireless network, not necesserily on that has an e-mail address. The can be done using a freeware application PocketWhere, see Mobile Tips and Tircks for details.
Just imagine what happens when the printer gets an e-mail which has a standard "Think of the planet before printing this e-mail" footer attached. Oh the irony.
If anyone at HP is reading this, make the drivers fucking work. That’s all I’m asking for.
From the HP color laserjet with its shitty colour that more often than not looked washed out or oversaturated with some odd hue, its 5-minute-long warm up cycle, the inexplicable your-print-job-got-borked please-cycle-the-power error code that the HP site itself could only throw out wild guesses for eliminating (copy and paste entire document into new blank document, re-print... try moving one of the images ever so slightly up, down, left or right... if you are printing from one application try printing from a different application... yeah, those were real suggestions; they’re fucking clueless)...
Or the HP laserjet with faulty firmware which requires the driver to sends it a firmware update every time the computer is booted, which it stupidly does by adding a job to the print queue with the result that if there was already a print job in the print queue when the computer was booted (say, because you rebooted because the fucking thing was frozen when you tried to print, but didn’t delete the job you’d just printed), the printer will freeze up completely (again)... and half the time it seemed like going to hibernation froze the printer up as well, or was it sleep mode that screwed it up... and apparently getting it to work on Ubuntu is even more fun...
HP drivers suck.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Yes, and you can buy it right now. Get a printer like mine: the HP LaserJet 2300 (circa ~2003). It costs less than $100 on Ebay, has built-in duplexing, accepts JetDirect network cards, and supports PostScript level 3. Best of all, you can buy remanufactured print cartridges on Ebay for it for about $20-25 each, which last 5-6000 pages.
If your printer is available at Best Buy, Target, or any other consumer store, it's a piece of crap. No decent printer is sold in places like that. God printers are sold only to businesses.
Actually, it is. We have a very expensive Lanier printer at my office which lets you scan documents, and then email them as PDFs to your (or any) email address. As the printer is in a separate room (and takes up much of it), and sits on the network, it doesn't have any other convenient way of transferring files.
I don't know if it accepts documents for printing that way, however. I kinda doubt it. It doesn't need to anyway; that's what IPP is for.
Now when will we get scanners that can email scanned documents automatically?
Noone writes jokes in base 13!
I don't want it printing every single frame of stupid lolcat videos my friends send me. What a waste of paper and toner!
My sig is better than your sig.